History

Softimage|3D was originally released at Siggraph in 1988 as the Softimage Creative Environment. Developed solely for Silicon Graphics workstations, it was a fast, integrated animation package that became highly regarded for its powerful animation capabilities. It was also quite expensive: an SGI workstation running Softimage cost upwards of $50,000.

The Softimage Creative Environment evolved a comprehensive and innovative toolset with particular strength in animation, and it was the first commercial 3D package to feature inverse kinematics. In a large visual effects studio environment, 3D models were typically created with NURBS in Alias|Wavefront's PowerAnimator, animated in Softimage, and rendered with Pixar's PhotoRealistic RenderMan. This process was often facilitated through the use of custom-made software like file converters and pipeline management tools.

A widely popular commercial 3D package by the mid 1990's, Softimage was used by Industrial Light and Magic to animate the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, by Cyan to create the adventure game Riven, and by many other companies for scores of film, television and video game projects. In 1994, Microsoft acquired the Softimage Corporation and renamed the package Softimage|3D, releasing a Windows NT port a year later. As the first high-end 3D package on the NT platform, it marked the beginning of the end of SGI's dominance in the computer animation industry. In 1996, Microsoft began offering Softimage|3D Extreme 3.5, which included particle effects and the mental ray renderer. 3D paint functionality was added a year later in version 3.7.

By the late 1990's, faster processors and cheap memory heralded the next generation of extensible, object-oriented 3D animation packages. Highly customizeable environments like Maya and Houdini became the vanguard of studio-level 3D software. The Softimage Corporation, which Microsoft sold to Avid in 1998, was unable to introduce its next generation package before Maya established a firm hold on the market. By the end of the decade, Softimage|3D had reached the end of the line with the release of version 4, concurrent with the debut of its replacement Softimage|XSI. XSI is still in active development as of 2007 but has yet to regain the popularity of its predecessor.

Features

Menus in Softimage|3D are divided between five modules: Model, Motion, Actor, Matter and Tools.